skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Excellent, another HN post telling me what I'm thinking. How would I know otherwise?!
Worth noting is that the contents of a safety deposit box are not insured by FDIC. I hope they use two distinct banks for redundancy.
The link he cited still does apply. It discusses several different issues. PNaCl's portability only covers a subset of them.
words get redefined. language evolves.

i'm sorry you're upset that a word that is personal to you because you feel it symbolizes an era when you were persecuted for your adolescent social awkwardness is being adopted by the mainstream to be somewhat "cool".

Society's view of "cool" changes occasionally. Fat girls were once the hot girls, it was once cool to be sexist and racist, and bellbottoms and mullets were once awesome (ok, mullets are still awesome).

i understand that you feel that an identity that is personal to you is being encroached upon, and maybe even feel like it dilutes your identity. but words, and meanings, and sentiments change.

i've never played dungeons and dragons or world of warcraft, and your article makes it sound like that makes me not a geek.

I definitely consider myself a geek and it sounds like you think that self identification "disrespects anyone who really did get hassled for being a geek". I write code, nerd out about brain teasers, think about math problems, but yeah, I also like Corona and miniskirts (you know, at least looking at them on reddit, because that's the closest I'll ever get to a miniskirt).

Your narrow definition of "geek" is just as "disrespectful" and alienating as the societally evolved broad one that you're offended by.

Language and social norms change. Accept it.
This is unfortunate. Once a table is partitioned and assuming new records are inserted over time, it's inevitable that some partitions will grow faster than others, and the advantage of partitioning is eroded by unequal-sized partitions.

So for a growing database this solution is really a stopgap measure, one that will eventually have to be repeated.

It seems to me that a hierarchical system has advantages over a huge single-level table of millions of records, for example one keyed by letters of the alphabet. But 100 million records in one flat table? Surely there's an organizing scheme that naturally produces faster access without resorting to artificially splitting up up the data.

To me, the fact that partitioning speeds up access means it's time to, not split up a gigantic table (something that may have to be done repeatedly), but rethink the database design.
"While PayPal was once known for easing the pain of that process, you can’t deny that digital payments has stagnated as the rest of the Web elevated in general usability." So true. With initiative like this, Stripe seems to be going in the right direction to become the new Paypal(better and improved of course ;-)) Way to go guys!
What the author uses as his strawman is a linear algebra course for engineers.

As mathematicians, we didn't do any of this matrix and vector stuff with numbers when introducing linear algebra in university. There were a bunch of axioms, and you proved things. That's how you know.

What the author sees as abstract "(2d vectors! 3d vectors!)" was way more applied than the stuff we dealt in.

But, granted, the purpose wasn't learning about how to get mini-spreadsheets for equations. It was about how to rigorously navigate a useful axiomatic setting.

(Later on, we proved that you can find a base, and write down your linear transformation as a bunch of numbers and call that a matrix; same for points and vectors. But we always saw that as somewhat ugly, and anyway limited to the finite dimensional case.)
If you haven't checked back already, they fixed this. See upstream in the thread.
I only read the article (which implies only employees will be editing the wiki), then went to the wiki itself later.
If you read Innovator's Dilemma, I suggest reading "Blue Ocean Strategy" as well. The overall concept is very similar, but with some different insights, and while Clayton focuses mainly on technology companies, this books also gives examples for different types of products from different industries.

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Uncontested-ebook/...
I don't understand - what part of what I have said has anything to do with a) being a zealot or b) revolutionary.

My statements were firmly on the side of the status quo police/militarily enforced liberal/social/democratic/capitalist western societies, and are, in and of themselves, neither surprising, controversial nor patently false.
Why do we need to make Photoshop in JS?

I can't make a printing press in C++, but why would I want to?

Photoshop was made during an era where computers were used to make media for physical printing. You would take a picture with an analog camera, digitize it, manipulate it in Photoshop, and then have it ready for print. "Save For Web" is the closest you get to using Photoshop for publishing to the web, and you'd have to admit it's a bit of an afterthought in the whole experience.

Software doesn't exist on it's own. It exists in an input and output environment, beyond just mice and monitors. It exists to capture information, manipulate it, and then republish it.

In many ways, memegenerator.net does a better job of consuming, manipulating, and publishing content for the web than Photoshop does.

Photoshop will probably not go away. There are still printing presses and there are avenues to publish things made with them. Media tends to gain a lot of inertia by the time it gets to the point of being a household name. However, this inertia doesn't really impede some other form of media from gaining it's own momentum. Photoshop is busy being Photoshop, not memegenerator.net.

If you ask my opinion, I'd say there is plenty of ground somewhere between memegenerator.net and Photoshop and there is no better language and environment to create these tools than the environment where they will be published: JavaScript running in a web browser.
Yup! I am being serious. Can't is just a word, and I don't think anyone would have any real long standing moral qualms if the source were to somehow suddenly appear in someone's mailbox in France! :D
I was aiming for questions relevant to general-purpose developers, not questions relevant to operating system developers -- and a small number of questions at that.

I covered locking, race conditions, virtual memory, and processes; I think those are much more relevant to most developers than knowing the internals of how filesystems work or how interrupts are routed.
The app works in landscape when in a conversation. This makes the text a bit bigger.
I've been through this myself. I realised that the problem was me, and the projects that I was working on. I was fortunate enough to be able to step away, then go and find work that IS rewarding (for me it's playing with the front end, where people play with the app and go "ooooh!" and "aaaah!").

The key for me was to document the things that I hated about the job, and avoid them at all costs, but to acknowledge that criticism is something that feeds back into an application improvement process. ie. Don't take it as personal that someone is criticising you/your work. Find methods of improving the communication channel so that you don't spend days/weeks coding only to find "that's not what I wanted! that sucks!"

I'm fortunate to have an ex hacker/programmer as my manager who knows/understands/addresses my needs very well in my current role.

At some point I stopped chasing the higher paycheck, because I recognised that with a higher paycheck comes higher expectations, demands, hardships. Look at it from the employer's perspective - "We could hire 2 graduates at your cost, at that rate we expect you to not make mistakes, and to get twice the amount of work done."

A friend earns almost twice as much as me, with similar years of experience, but he is expected to miss lunch, stay back until midnight, answer calls to China/India on a friday night. No please/thankyou/you're doing a great job. Just "do it".

Keep searching until you find the right role.
Not true. Since last year, the reason Google is paying them so much money for search engine placement is because there was competitive bidding from Bing.

https://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almo...
Tower is slow. While a slightly nicer UI, and it running like shit on large repos - at least for work - makes it a non-starter
Neat.

Some code does not round-trip. This JS terminates but if I convert the resulting CS back to JS, I get an infinite loop.

function test() {
var i;
var countdown = function(n) {
var i;
for (var i = n; i > 0; i--) {
console.log(i);
}
}
for (var i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
countdown(i);
}
}
test();
I think he means that they are two fundamentally different devices. 1980s cell phones still do voice communication. A replicator, unlike a 3-D printer does not simply reproduce a shape. It also reproduces the constituent matter.
We recently moved to GitHub Enterprise and it really is not as expensive as it looks. It is $250/year per developer... not really that much considering what you get. Plus it is a virtual server provided for us, so we just have to upload software upgrade packages to get the latest updates. We didn't have to spend the money on someone to set up all of the MySql, Redis, Solr, etc. services to get it running. So honestly I consider GitHub Enterprise to be quite a cost savings. Just a counterpoint...

EDIT: We are not a startup, but still something to consider.
You're misunderstanding the purpose of these questions. It isn't to determine whether you are able to figure out the answers to these questions -- as many people have pointed out, some of these are simple "type into google" questions.

The point is that knowing the answers or being able to figure them out on your own is, I believe, strongly correlated with having a good understanding of the entire area the question is drawn from.
Advice is Nice but Getting Things Done is Better
Like the different business model (fact that you can buy as little as 1hr of work at a time, unlike traditional PR) and the use of coffee analogy to describe their services.
I will have to give it a try again. It sounded like a great fit for what I do but couldn't get the boxes and filters to work as I thought they did.
I would guess that the example was explicitly contrived so that prefetching would be useless.

Yes -- even if prefetching could happen, the first function would be faster than the second, but I thought removing the whole issue of prefetching would simplify the question.
Bon fortuna!
Apple gets 30% from their music sales, and that still doesn't leave them with much. Let's just say the labels leave Pandora, Spotify and others with a lot less than 30%, which makes it very hard for them to operate their business, and if these services can't be sustainable and eventually start dying out, it will all because of the labels.
One approach to this is geometric algebra. I couldn't find a good reference that explains it intuitively, but there's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_vector_algebra_an...
Show HN: backshavr.com

Ever wished you could order your own backshave-bro at 3am from your iPhone? Now you can!

The frat-boy grooming industry is ripe for massive disruption!
All abstractions can make your code unreadable; the key, as always, is to create good abstractions and document them clearly. Macros are syntactic abstractions. It's just as important to document them as it is for functions or objects. Of course, if you just have a little local macro that you're using for convenience, looking at the implementation may be sufficient. But when you write a macro that you want to share from a module, rather than requiring your clients to read the implementation, you document the syntax and the semantics, just like you would if you were writing a separate language.

But by having macros directly in JS, instead of having to use a whole language that compiles to JS, you can combine syntactic features from different sources. For example, right now there's no way to use one feature you like from CoffeeScript with another feature you like from TypeScript. You just can't combine them. But with macros, you could import two different syntaxes from two different libraries and use them in the same code.

On top of that, if we actually had macros in a future version of the standard, you wouldn't even have to precompile the macros offline, and you wouldn't need a preprocessing step at all. (For latency purposes, you might want to preprocess macros offline as an optimization. But for development, not having to do a preprocessing step is more convenient.)

Dave
I'm a TPM, interested in Ruby/Rails, and almost done with my MBA. What do I do?
I'm currently a TPM, but my role is being rolled into what will be effectively be a DBA role. I have the opportunity to do this DBA role, but I'm not sure having DBA experience is going to put me in a good spot when I'm finished with my MBA.

I'm super interested in Ruby/Rails. I've finished the Hartl tutorial and currently starting on a few other tutorials as well as my personal landing page. I think it would be fantastic to get involved with a startup using Rails, but I obviously don't have the experience to be a developer. Any companies willing to shape a new Rails developer?

On top of this, I'll have my MBA soon.

My question is: How can I use my interest with Ruby/Rails to bolster / foster my experience as a TPM and MBA ? It seems as though most startups/companies are looking for devs with tons of experience. What about PM's that want to get their hands dirty? Or at least be involved in that culture?
People who like to dodge awkward conversations, and who are skilled at it, will dodge the awkward conversations you really want to have with them. In the case of romantic relationships, they'll dodge the conversations you desperately NEED to have with them, and you'll get stuck in a hopeless rut where they repeatedly make you feel like a problem is being addressed when it really isn't. You might not blame them for it right away, but believe me, the results are unsatisfying.

On a not entirely unrelated note, people will also use empathy to respond to requests for things. You can spend years with someone before you learn that expressing empathy is their way of avoiding saying "no." (You'll figure this out much faster if it's a working relationship instead of a romantic one.)

Empathy can be a powerful, powerful force, and it can act on either party.
Supreme Court Terminates Warrantless Electronic Spying Case
>... especially with cross-group transactions (added last year)...

Thanks for mentioning this: I didn't know they had added this feature; that definitely makes some of the data modeling problems easier. Without this, I found it often led to situations where you had to make horribly painful decisions that affected both functionality and scalability very early on in your project lest you end up with tons of data that you now have to programmatically and mostly manually migrate (which is why, to me, I keep being surprised that you keep mentioning ops challenges for normal databases: with the ability to do global schema and index changes concurrently and safely inside of transactions, I found the amount of time and thought I need to put into managing something like PostgreSQL a fraction of most alternatives that supposedly scale better).
Ask HN: Any Sydney based startups looking for some extra hands?
Hi Everyone!

Are there are any Sydney based startups looking for developers?

Thank you :)
They can, but ruling on an appeal without issuing an opinion is not only considered bad jurisprudence, it has no precedential effect and thus does not create binding law on the lower court.

Consequently, it is rarely done. Moreover, in most instances where it is done, the reversal is on procedural rather than substantive grounds.
Show HN: Portra, An iOS6 Photo Sharing Web App
Portra uses iOS6's support for file inputs to let you take a photo, apply a filter with Canvas and share it to Twitter. Just a little proof of concept to show what's possible. Code is at https://github.com/interstateone/portra

Notes: It can be slow, there's probably some optimization to be done in the filter. There's also a squished image bug that pops up every once in a while when using a photo directly from the camera, let me know if you have any ideas what may be causing this.
Thats maybe a day of single developer's work - less if you actually pay your startup dev's market value.

Paying for a service that can double or triple a developer's productivity - people say the UI on BB is still not as great, so that counts for something - must at some point justify that developer's time.

If you have enough repos that you'd need to spend $200 a month on a platform that offers:

- Wikis
- Basic Issue Tracking
- Source Control (and damn good source control at that)
- Integration with many popular startup tools

Then maybe your startup should be out of business. I could shit $200 dollars and pay for my companies hosting.

Trying to skimp on this is like telling your 10+ dev team to use google talk for offline coordination. Yes, you save money on chat, but you lose all that time I waste copy-pasting and coordinating chats between multiple devs.
CERN - Accelerating Science with Puppet (PuppetConf 2012 Keynote)
>"The whole point of bitcoin was to decouple currency from institutions (banks/governments etc.).">

The above statement is incorrect.

The "whole point of bitcoin" per http://bitcoin.org/about.html :
>"Bitcoin is designed around the idea of using cryptography to control the creation and transfer of money, rather than relying on central authorities."

As you can see - the intent is not to decouple the currency itself from institutions, but the creation and transfer of the currency from central authorities.

To address your other points:

Bitcoin is on equal footing compared to other currencies with regard to many things including: government confiscation, individual risk, and institutional risk.

Other currencies have the advantage of: far greater acceptance, low barrier to use (you just physically hand something to someone else)

Bitcoin has the advantage of: no central bank, no central banking inflation (by design, creation and transfer is via cryptography)
Why not an Android app instead?

To develop an iPhone game you need a relatively modern Apple desktop/laptop (at most 2 year old if you plan to run xcode 4.5, thus fairly expensive) and an iOS device (the cheapest you could go would likely be a 4th gen used iPod, still somewhat expensive) + a yearly $100 license (not sure if this is waived for students?). You also end up learning a somewhat insular language with a ton of idiosyncrasies (Smalltalk on top of C with a somewhat uncommon take on memory management).

I feel like you get a lot more bang for your buck with Java and the ability to develop from any platform out there. An old Ubuntu box will do just fine, or Windows for that matter.
NSQ: Message queueing at scale
Ah, do they finally have a debugger again?
Touch screen controls are different to keyboard and mouse, not inherently worse. Fingle could not exist as a desktop game, for example.

I don't know how big a deal the underpowered hardware actually is; my suspicion is that you're overstating it.

I agree that an app is unlikely to get any traction, but it's not obvious that a desktop game is any more likely to.
Ask HN: how can one submit links to bitly's engineering blog?
I tried submitting a link to bitly's new NSQ project here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4634723

It appears that HN auto kills any bitly.com link. Is there any way around this?

For those interested, the link in question is:

http://word.bitly.com/post/33232969144/nsq
reg. "And what's the motivation behind the formula for the determinant?", if I'm understanding your question right, the neat little pic at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinant#2-by-2_matrices - might be what you were looking for.
Not yet it isn't. In the current UI, to get to the source code, you have to

1. Find the little "Source" link and click it.

2. Find the "Browse" link, which is in a little toolbar right under the other little toolbar, next to the (less relevant) "Changes" and "Clones" links, which look visually near-identical.

3. In most (but not all) projects, hunt down the word "trunk" in tiny 13px text, and click it to see the main development branch.

Compare to GitHub or BitBucket, which just show you the damn code.

(Yes, I know you were joking, but I've been wanting to rant about this UI failure for a while now. And don't even get me started on Launchpad.)
You just download the CRX and then drag it into an open Extensions tab. This works, but is completely unintuitive.
There sure are, what are your skills? Send me your details if you're interested in working on some very deep problems
No, I had several options on the page linked by OP. When I went to the locationmanagement.vzw.com page, it says, "There are no services available. A location service must be downloaded on the handset to be listed here."
Email PG.

It looks like a link shortener, but this is new.
Find a private investigator that specializes in this. When you find out an exact location, have the private investigator call the police in the area. Try to get pics of the laptop, and pics (ideally identity) of the person if you can in the meantime. Look for patterns in IP addresses to anticipate next moves.
Sorry, missed the Yoda misquote at the end, I must respond!

Yoda said "where you are" but you used "was". Possibly just a tense-typo, but it matters. Tracking where JS is is a part of the TC39 job, but only a part. It's easy to fall into a trap where we standardize only what developers can express given the language's current semantics and so miss the chance to extend those semantics.

But I'll take the tense-corrected bait: yes, I talk about the future. The past (including its most recent instantaneous sample known as "the present") is greedy. With no one to look ahead or synthesize ideas from compile-to-JS and other languages that win user support, JS will tend to stagnate, all else equal. Champions (not just me) must fight for a better future.

Stagnation on the web is a social ill. It costs developers tons of time. We know this not only from IE6, but from Android 2.x WebKit. Some not-disinterested parties might want to make use of a crisis of this sort, to force a "new JS" (Dart? remember WPF and WPF/E in the past) to be adopted for want of anything to relieve the stagnation.

Not me. The cost is too high, the lessons learned in JS will be half- or three-quarters-lost, and too much code and developer brainprint will be thrown away. I'm reminded of the XML Utopia that was planned in w3.org to save us from bad old HTML, before a few of us called b.s. and started the whatwg.org to do HTML5.

The web is an evolving system, JS is part of the web standards and must evolve too. Skate where the puck will be. Or to wannabe Yoda on ice: where the puck will be, you must skate!
As a non-white person that grew up rather poor, and know a lot of other similar people, I don't find this accurate at all.
This will end well!
OpenStack "Folsom release" Architecture
Thanks! I happen to agree with with Dan Gohman (http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/43...), but I'm not sure where Chris Lattner ended up on this.

Much is possible in software, so perhaps some day, or under some transformation, LLVM bitcode would be suitable as a stable long-term object file format.

There's still a point here: PNaCl is pushing a stone up a very tall hill. ANDF and other Universal Object formats go back to the 70s if not earlier. It's very difficult to standardize such things, never mind Pepper.
Quite true -- I'll definitely have to be careful in how I interpret the data. I'm hoping that the issue I'm most interested in -- comparing how people do on different questions, and comparing how different people do, will be less strongly biased by the poor sampling method.